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My tallest welding project ever.

08-13-2008, 10:10 AM

Just wanted to share my latest and tallest welding project. I made and installed this tower for my father´s farm wind turbine. I is 49 feet tall and has a square section of 16 inches. Weight is 400 pounds aprox. I built it with my CST 280 using 1/10" dia 7018 rod. Mains are 1" 1/8 steel angle and the cross memebers 5/8" angle. I supports a wind turbine of 0.4 kw peak power that feeds a 12 volt DC system. This week end with a 10 to 15 mph wind the system charged the batteries at 18 to 25 amps rate, not bad!

Very nice! Do you have anymore info on the generator portion of it? I would be very interested to see some pictures and hear some details of what you used as I am looking to do something similar on my weekend cabin.

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Very nice! Do you have anymore info on the generator portion of it? I would be very interested to see some pictures and hear some details of what you used as I am looking to do something similar on my weekend cabin.

Thank´s walker! The generator is a triphasic brushless type. It has permanent magnets on the rotor and a triphasic winding on the stator. The coarse voltage regulation as well as the overspeed protection works on the horizontal furl of the tail. The rotor is about 8 feet diameter, the 3 blades are fiberglass and the hub is cast iron.
The unit comes with the voltage regulator, it has a fullwave rectifier and a dump load for fine voltage regulation. Also the regulator includes an amp meter and a volt meter.
Rated power is about 0.3kw at 14 mph wind speed, output voltage is for 12 volt battery systems. We installed 2 AC Delco deep cycle batts rated at 110 amps each in parallel, but plan to add two more soon. We connected also a 1500 watt power inverter for illumination and ac power of fridge and the like.

Originaly we mounted it on a lower tower, but this one lets it catch higher wind speeds with notable less ground induced turbulence. That translated in efficient operation, with less noise and less stress to the machine.

Just let me know if you need more info, I also have closer photos of the machine.

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nice job.
i would love to add wind turbine power to my place. i got lots of wind, just no $$ for the turbine.
have you looked at the ones that are tube shaped ? supposed to work better in low wind and changing directional wind.
any idea what kind of $$ the setup was ??

thanks for the help
......or..........
hope i helped
sigpic feel free to shoot me an e-mail direct i have time to chat.james@newyorkmetalart.comsummer is here, plant a tree. if you don't have space or time to plant one sponsor some one else to plant one for you. a tree is an investment in our planet, help it out.
JAMES

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nice job.
i would love to add wind turbine power to my place. i got lots of wind, just no $$ for the turbine.
have you looked at the ones that are tube shaped ? supposed to work better in low wind and changing directional wind.
any idea what kind of $$ the setup was ??

I don´t know how the tube shaped types work. This one has pretty low wind startup caracteristics as well as low rpms max peak out that was what we were looking for (our weather is rainy, windy and with high humidity, ice hitting the blades during a storm and birds have damaged faster turning turbines in our past expereince).

The turbine costs usd 1500, the tower cost (materials only) was around usd 700, the power inverter and batts around usd 1000.

Regards:

Jerónimo.

Jerónimo.

Traumao č la elčtrica.

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I saw a job today with 2 clamps installed, the mechanic did a nice job and used thimbles nice and tight and installed the clips back wards. As Ironhead said, cant saddle a dead horse, maybe someone has pics from a site with clamping instructions?
Ok, here is the first google hit. http://wolfadventures.org/Ropes%20Co...rds/clamps.htm Nice tower by the way.

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Jerónimo:
Wow, lots of pieces. Nice job, must have taken a lot of time, cutting and fitting. Did you use mig, flux-core or stick?

How did you stand it up? Edit: AZguy beat me.

Saddling a dead horse, there's a right way and wrong way to install cable clamps. Sberry's link shows how. Somehow strength is effected, whether you put the u-bolts around the length of the strand or the rolled back stub.

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I saw a job today with 2 clamps installed, the mechanic did a nice job and used thimbles nice and tight and installed the clips back wards. As Ironhead said, cant saddle a dead horse, maybe someone has pics from a site with clamping instructions?
Ok, here is the first google hit. http://wolfadventures.org/Ropes%20Co...rds/clamps.htm Nice tower by the way.

Thank´s for the link sberry. After your question I started to wonder if the clamps were installed correctly. Well some of them were not. Last night the tower and wind turbine survived 100 kmh wind speeds during a storm, that said, I will return to the farm as soon as possible to reinstall the clamps in the correct way and check the turbine for possible damages to the blades.

Regards:

Jerónimo.

Jerónimo.

Traumao č la elčtrica.

Comment

Thank´s! First we assembled the tower on the ground, as can be seen in the picture bellow, the base of the tower is a hinge which articulates in line with one diagonal of the suqare formed by the anchors, ie east-west anchors. We selected a level curve on the gorund as flat as possible in a way that the anchor´s eyes and the base bolt where level and all lined together. Then we squared the tower on the ground refered to those east-west vertices. In that way when you rise the tower it is perfectly squared to a horizontal line on the east-west direction, which belongs to a plane that is level. Then installed the east-west cables, not to tight, and with that distance measured, anchored the south cable to the ground plus one meter to compensate the ground slope. Then we took the north cable, aded some more meters of cable for pulling with security (in case somethings fails), and slowly pulled form north with a heavy tractor. The white tube that you see atached to the tower, is a pole used to give more leverage to the pulling cable and to avoid the tractor pulling the entire thing with ground base included.